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Environmental Politics

Volume 23, 2014 - Issue 5: Innovations in Climate Policy: The Politics of Invention, Diffusion and Evaluation
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Introduction

Innovations in climate policy: the politics of invention, diffusion, and evaluation

Andrew Jordan Tyndall Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UKCorrespondencea.jordan@uea.ac.uk
&
Dave Huitema Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam and Open University, The Netherlands
Pages 715-734
Published online: 01 Aug 2014

Introduction

Innovations in climate policy: the politics of invention, diffusion, and evaluation

Abstract

The governance of climate change is in flux. In the understandable rush to explore what is filling the governance gaps created by gridlock in the international regime, scholars risk under-appreciating the capacity of states to engage in policy innovation at national and sub-national levels. Based on a review of existing concepts and theoretical explanations for (in)action at this level, we make the case for adopting a more holistic approach to understanding policy innovation, covering the source of new policy elements (‘invention’), their wider entry into use (‘diffusion’), and their projected and/or real effects (‘evaluation’). The analytical and methodological challenges that arise from integrating these three perspectives are systematically explored and integrated into a new analytical framework used in the other contributions to this volume to explore more fully the politics of invention, diffusion, and evaluation in specific areas of mitigation and adaptation policy.

The ‘new’ climate governance: changing contours and processes

‘[W]e hear a great deal these days about the need for “new” policy – new priorities, new ideas, new departures. We hear practically nothing at all, however, about how new policies are to be brought into being’. (Polsby 1984, p. 1)

‘There is a role that international agreements have in addressing climate change…. But you can’t ever forget that the most important locus of action on climate change is at the national level’. (Todd Stern, United States Special Envoy for Climate Change, quoted in European Voice, 28 November 2013, p. 12)

The ability to innovate is a fundamental capacity that all political systems should ideally possess (Weaver and Rockman 1993, p. 6), alongside the ability to set priorities, allocate resources, and manage political conflict. This capacity is, however, being tested to its limit by the many complex ‘mega trends’ that are rapidly changing the world – population growth, rapidly intensifying resource use – and their associated ‘wicked’ policy problems, not least climate change. When set against the latest scientific predictions of future climate impacts, the pace of climate policy change at all levels of governance appears painfully inadequate. Over the past two decades, academics and policy analysts have generally assumed that the international regime centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would take the lead in developing and steering innovative policy responses. But the long-held suspicion that the climate regime might be incapable of fulfilling this expectation was amply confirmed by the inconclusive outcome of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference (Victor 2010). The critical question of what will henceforth fill the ‘governance gap’ caused by the ‘gridlock’ in the regime has thus emerged, triggering many lively debates amongst academics (Abbott 2013, p. 4) and policymakers.

Scholars have mostly contributed to these debates by exploring ways to exploit some of the cracks that have appeared in the international regime (Keohane and Victor 2011, Biermann and Pattberg 2012). Others have found it more helpful to think in terms of the potential role of ‘transnational’ forms of governance (Bulkeley et al. 2012), which cut across traditional jurisdictional boundaries and are much less reliant on state steering. Crucially, these new forms of governing are said to operate outside, underneath, and around international fora where nation states meet, such as the UNFCCC (Bulkeley and Moser 2007, p. 9, Okereke et al. 2009, n. 3), and hence are multi-scalar. In this rapidly expanding vein of work, we find even more open concepts such as climate ‘experiments’ (Hoffmann 2011), ‘polycentric orders’ (Ostrom 2010), and transnational initiatives (Hale and Roger 2014), relating to situations in which independent actors from different sectors and levels of governance work together, often via local initiatives that lie well beyond the reach of states.

These changing patterns and processes are exciting because they suggest that actors may eventually be able to work out for themselves how to fill governance gaps (Ostrom 2010), rather than having to wait for states to craft a comprehensive regime solution that may never appear (WDR 2010, p. 342). But despite many recent references to new narratives and forms of climate politics and policy (Lachapelle and Paterson 2013), the ‘new’ climate governance research field is still relatively inchoate. Empirical research on some aspects of the new governance (e.g. the transnational) is advancing much more rapidly than on others. Positive knowledge claims (governing is occurring outside the regime) and more normative (decentred governance is an inherently better way to govern climate change) are often so subtly interwoven (Patt 2010, Pielke 2010, Lilliestam et al. 2012) that it is difficult for the reader to separate one from the other.

In the rush to study new forms of governing ‘beyond’, ‘below’, and ‘outside’ the state-dominated climate regime, analysts and practitioners risk neglecting the continuing importance of policymaking activities at the national level. National policies, encompassing national, regional, and local government-led initiatives, have always been an important part of the landscape of climate governance (Compston and Bailey 2008, Dubash et al. 2013). In Europe, some predate the UNFCCC (Harrison and Sundstrom 2010, Jordan et al. 2010, 2012); the ‘new’ climate governance literature is now revealing that policy development is continuing in many other parts of the world (Townshend et al. 2013), including well-known outliers such as the United States (Selin and vanDeveer 2011). In fact, the more international policy adopts a ‘pledge and review’ style of governing, the more governing by the nation state at the national level will de facto become the international regime.

To suggest that national policy offers a new route to governing climate change tells us little about where the new policies will come from, how they will spread, and whether they (will) have influential effects. In recent years, academics have identified and studied many prominent policy developments at national and sub-national levels: emissions trading in several US states and European Union (EU) Member States; the legally binding targets embedded in the UK Climate Change Act; and a myriad of national adaptation planning exercises. But these apparent novelties are often studied in an ad hoc fashion, with little effort made to uncover general patterns and underlying processes. These aspects are of course precisely those highlighted by Polsby (first epigram above) in one of the first book-length accounts of policy innovation. As currently organised, the new climate governance literature seems ill equipped to provide convincing answers to Polsby’s disarmingly simple questions.

The broad purpose of this collection is to explore what stands to be gained by organising the policy innovation literature in a more systematic and theoretically informed manner, drawing on shared terms and concepts. It has three main objectives. First, it aims to add conceptual sharpness to the study of policy innovation by drawing on relevant literatures. Long ago, it was argued that there is no single theory or commonly accepted definition of policy innovation (Downs and Mohr 1976), a crucial point that remains valid. So rather than seek a parsimonious definition that inhibits debate, we draw upon and seek new connections between three well-established perspectives in the literature and their associated definitions. These focus on:

  • the invention of policies (and elements therein) that appear to be new, through the activities of ‘policy entrepreneurs’, businesses, and/or ‘leader’ states;

  • the policy innovation’s subsequent entry into use via processes of diffusion, transfer, lesson drawing, and adaptation to local circumstances; and

  • policy innovation’s emerging impacts, centring on how far ‘innovative’ policies are truly ‘impactful’ (i.e. do they have significant and long-lasting impacts, for whom, and by when?), requiring careful ex post evaluation.

Our second objective is to use these three perspectives to interpret a number of empirical examples of policy innovation at the national level. As well as examining the general utility of adopting the three perspectives, the eight empirical contributions pose more specific questions: in precisely what circumstances do policy innovations emerge? Which actors promote them and why? What capacities (political, bureaucratic, epistemic) do they draw upon? Our third and final objective (addressed in our concluding contribution – Jordan and Huitema 2014a) is to reflect critically on these cases and others (Jordan and Huitema 2014b) to formulate a new research agenda to guide this rapidly expanding area of scholarship and practice.

In focusing on national policy innovation, we acknowledge that there are many possible motives for (re)focusing on policy innovation at national level. This multiplicity helpfully reminds us of its inescapably political nature. For the US government, it provides a good reason not to adopt a successor to the Kyoto Protocol – a point very clearly made by Todd Stern (second epigram above). For other policymakers, national policy is attractive because it may offer a much needed route to keeping warming within two degrees (Jordan, Rayner and Schroeder et al. 2013), one which may avoid some of the collective action dilemmas that have hindered international-level agreement (Davis et al. 2013, p. 6). Finally, scholars like us are eager to study the role of national policy in order to determine whether the ‘centre of gravity’ of climate governance has really shifted as far and as fast as some claim (Hoffmann 2011, p. 154). Then – and only then – will it be possible to assess fully whether a turn back to the nation state and its subsidiaries genuinely resolves critical collective action problems or just displaces them to the national level, which typically also comprises many different and often competing elements (Keohane and Victor 2011, p. 12). As an inherently disruptive process (Lynn 1997, p. 96) that challenges defenders of the status quo, innovation is potentially replete with politics, yet some of the literatures dealing with policy innovation have tended to push them to one side. The contributors to this collection seek to remedy that by shedding light on who or what motivates policy innovation, what new patterns of governing are created, and what, if any, change is made in the social and natural world.

In addressing these topics, the authors confront another critical issue that emerges whenever and wherever the idea of governing anything is invoked: steering.1 Amongst those who study the international regime or national policy, the state has always been an obvious point of steering (in line with governance scholars such as Pierre and Peters 2000). States establish carbon markets, evaluate and oversee the performance of non-state actors, and help to legitimise their behaviour (Bulkeley et al. 2012). Studying these processes at national and sub-national levels therefore offers a handy window into the wider role of the state in governing, a role which we and others (Bulkeley and Moser 2007, pp. 1–2) sense is in danger of being under-appreciated in the rush to understand the more transnational aspects of the ‘new’ climate governance, many of which have of course flourished in the shadow of state action (Abbott 2012, Hale and Roger 2014, see also Börzel and Risse 2010).

The remainder of this introduction unfolds as follows. The second section explains the origins of the three perspectives identified above and shows how they relate to three important meta-debates that have continually arisen in the innovation literature. The third and fourth sections more systematically explore the existing literatures on policy innovation, noting key terms, significant advancements made, and remaining research gaps, starting with the most extensive (addressing policy diffusion), and then moving onto policy invention and evaluation. Finally, we conclude and introduce the other nine contributions.

Innovation: a conceptual introduction

There are many types of innovation – process, product, and organisational innovation, to name just three (Fagerberg 2005, p. 6). This collection is principally concerned with policy innovation, although obviously, innovative policies are themselves often responses to ‘non-policy’ triggers, and in turn seek to generate societal or technological changes. Countless volumes have been written on innovation (e.g. Rogers 2003, Fagerberg 2005). The fact that innovation is such a cross-disciplinary and normatively appealing concept has, however, contributed to a fair degree of intellectual ‘fuzziness’ (Fagerberg 2005, p. 21). According to the Oxford Dictionary, innovation can be either a thing (a noun) or a process (a verb). Hence, innovation can be a product of innovating – ‘a thing newly introduced’ – or it can relate to the act of innovating – ‘the introduction of a new thing; the alteration of something established’.

However, as soon as we move beyond these basic distinctions, a number of large and mostly unresolved conceptual debates open up (Considine et al. 2009). First, is innovation mostly a process (a verb), or is it an outcome (a noun)? The most common view is that it can be both (Roberts 1992, p. 59), hence the decision by many innovation scholars to adopt a systems-level focus that in seeking to capture both, glosses over more specific factors, including, crucially, the role of politics and governance. Second, how big and how novel does a particular change have to be to count as an innovation? Much ink has been spilt in an attempt to offer a definitive answer to this question. Thus, a distinction is commonly made between fairly minor improvements and adjustments, and much rarer and more fundamental changes ‘[that] represent clear departures from existing practice’ (Dewar and Dutton 1986, p. 1422). Rogers (2003) tries to sidestep this second debate by arguing that an innovation is ‘an idea, practice or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption’ (Rogers 2003, p. 12, emphasis added). In other words, innovation is context-specific (Roberts 1992, p. 56). However, this only begs the question of which context should be the referent, a point to which we will return. Third, how should innovation be assessed, if one wants to go beyond the very simple view that it is inherently good or bad? In many studies, innovation is so heavily ‘laden with positive value’ (Downs and Mohr 1976, p. 700) that its underlying purposes and eventual effects are either left unexplored or assumed to be positive (Rogers 2003, p. 106). In a complex problem area such as climate change, where many potential policy solutions vie for attention, the relative attractiveness of different processes and outputs is often at the very centre of policy debate.

Rather than close down these issues by forcing the authors to subscribe to a particular view of innovation, we organise their contributions using the three perspectives outlined above: invention, diffusion, and evaluation. The term invention is normally restricted to the development of something that is entirely new – i.e. not used anywhere else in the world before (Rogers 2003, p. 43). The reference point (context) in this case is global. Diffusion refers to the process through which these inventions circulate and possibly enter into common use, via processes of learning, transfer, and adoption. In this perspective, the reference point is the adopting unit or actor: ‘“new” means only new to the adopting agent, and not necessarily to the world in general’ (Downs and Mohr 1979, p. 385). What might the analytical benefits be of differentiating invention from innovation? First, it encourages analysts to study the sources of novelty; after all, without invention, surely there can be no diffusion/innovation (Hall 2005, p. 479). Also, it helps to draw out the difficulties associated with scaling up an invention into an innovation (Lynn 1997, p. 98). Sometimes the two are very tightly linked, but there can also be a big time lag (Fagerberg 2005, p. 5), due to the absence of supportive infrastructures and complementary inventions. Rogers (2003) describes many examples of good ideas (e.g. the Dvorak keyboard) that for one reason or another did not take off. Equally, some actors (‘innovators’) can be highly innovative without necessarily being very inventive, i.e. they combine and secure agreement on the need to adopt ideas originally developed by others. According to Schumpeter (see Fagerberg 2005), the role of the innovator (what he termed ‘the entrepreneur’) is not the same as the inventor: she prospers by combining different elements (knowledge, resources, opportunities) at the right place and time. We explore the role of policy entrepreneurs in more detail below.

Our third and final perspective focuses on the effects of innovation(s), both expected and real. In general, the innovation literature has rather neglected the effect or ‘consequences’ of innovation (Rogers 2003, p. 31). To count as an innovation, some have argued that it should not only be new or widely adopted; it must also do something, namely substantively change the world, particularly in a radical and disruptive manner (Fagerberg 2005, p. 7). Again, in the literature, one finds a distinction between incremental innovations and more radical ones that transform the world permanently. One of the potential benefits of extending the focus to include effects is that it opens up the ‘pro innovation bias’ to greater scrutiny (Roberts 1992). But for reasons that are well known to evaluation scholars, a focus on effects also has its complications (attribution, unintended effects, etc.).

In order to explore what new light these three perspectives shed on the three meta-debates noted above, we need to move to the more specific analytical level of policy innovation.

Policy innovation: key concepts and processes

In the policy sciences and governance work more generally, policy innovation is commonly treated not just as any dependent variable, but one of the most important (Tsebelis 1995, Heritier 1997, Scharpf 2006, Ostrom 2010). However, too often, it appears as a rather blunt category – an undifferentiated form of ‘policy change’ – which robs it of explanatory value. Polsby (1984, p. 173) noted that innovation comprises two interlinked processes – invention (‘causing policy options to come into existence’) and diffusion (‘turning options to political purposes’). However, his advice was ignored, and the field fragmented as early contributors predicted it would (Downs and Mohr 1976). Thus, as in the broader innovation literature, the term ‘policy invention’ is normally restricted to the development of policies or elements therein that are entirely new – i.e. they have not been adopted by any other adopter in the world before (Berry and Berry 2007, p. 223). As explored in greater detail below, defined thus, policy invention becomes such a narrow and restrictive category that scholars have instead focused on the inventive activities of actors such as policy entrepreneurs, especially at the agenda setting and policy formulation stages.

By contrast, the much more extensive literature on policy diffusion has built on the argument that it is more fruitful to analyse the newness or otherwise of an innovation by relating it to the context in which it is adopted. As long ago as the 1960s, a policy innovation was more parsimoniously defined as ‘a program or policy which is new to the states adopting it, no matter how old the program may be or how many other states may have adopted it’ (Walker 1969, p. 881). According to this definition, a state can innovate simply by adopting (some aspect of) a policy that other states have adopted many years before. Although many other policy-related attributes could in principle diffuse – administrative capacities and discourse, for example – in the interests of parsimony, diffusion scholars have mostly set these aside (Graham et al. 2013). Most policy diffusion researchers are therefore explicitly not interested in processes of creation and invention; once created, and following Walker, many opt to assume that policy innovations are essentially invariant, on which more below.

The third and final perspective on innovation – evaluation – is far and away the least well developed of the three,2 although its relevance has long been recognised by scholars wary of placing the analytical bar so low as to treat all policy adoptions as innovations. For Lynn (1997, p. 96), innovations are ‘an original, disruptive, and fundamental transformation of … core tasks. Innovation changes deep structures and changes them permanently’. Polsby (1984, p. 8) agreed, arguing that the term should be restricted to ‘a policy or a set of policies that seem to have altered (or promise to alter) the lives of persons affected by them in substantial and fairly permanent ways’ (see also Behn 1997). The decarbonisation of society in the next four decades is widely held to approximate to such a level of social change. Including an evaluation perspective in this special issue encourages the contributors to examine critically several apparent policy changes that have occurred in climate governance in the past 10–15 years – such as the increased reliance on market-based instruments – and ask what, if any, effects they have actually produced (Huitema et al. 2011). The three perspectives are summarised in . We will show that although they appear in separate rows, in practice there has been some overlap between them.

Table 1. Three perspectives on policy innovation: key orientations and variables.

Understanding policy innovation: three perspectives

A diffusion perspective

This literature has sought to explain the process through which individual states adopt new policies. When plotted over time, these cumulative adoptions typically exhibit an S-curve or ogive distribution (Hall 2005). In his landmark contribution, Walker distinguished between two subtypes: internal and external determinants or diffusion approaches (Berry and Berry 2007, p. 224).

Internal approaches generally assume that the political, economic, and social factors that lead a particular state to innovate are internal to it. The underlying assumption is that states are not significantly influenced by the actions of others. The initial literature identified states that seemed to be especially innovative across a range of policy areas and sought to explore the attributes associated with that pattern. Over time, certain ‘correlates’ (or determinants) of innovation were identified: the motivation to innovate (e.g. perceived problem pressure or expected electoral gain); the obstacles to innovation (e.g. the cost of adopting a new policy); and the availability of certain factors that overcome the obstacles (Karch 2006, p. 405). Considering motivation, diffusion researchers have shown that policy innovation is more likely when perceived problem pressure is high, and when an election is imminent or (in the case of unpopular policies) more distant. The most salient obstacles have been shown to be perceived costs (financial, electoral) of adoption and weak state capacities (bureaucratic, financial; Graham et al. 2013, pp. 13–14). Finally, with respect to the third correlate, larger and wealthier states appear to innovate first (Volden 2006). However, non-financial resources – in the form of policy entrepreneurs and advocacy coalitions – can also overcome some of these barriers (Berry and Berry 2007). One of the great unresolved questions is how these internal characteristics exert influence: do they trigger innovation or do they simply shape its timing and form (Berry and Berry 2007, p. 232)?

Diffusion (or external determinant) approaches, by contrast, challenge the assumption that once a state has adopted a new policy, it is unlikely to affect other states’ behaviour. Instead, diffusion researchers have built on Rogers (2003, pp. 5–6) and defined policy diffusion as ‘when one government’s decision about whether to adopt a [policy innovation] is influenced by the choices made by other governments’ (Graham et al. 2013). These approaches directly explore how first adopters affect those that follow. Initially, researchers assumed that followers were more likely to emulate geographically proximate states, but this view has since been challenged (Matisoff and Edwards 2014).

Drawing on the policy transfer literature (Benson and Jordan 2011), policy diffusion researchers have used the triad of learning, competition and coercion to explore what motivates states to emulate one another (Shipan and Volden 2008, 2012). Learning in and via networks has emerged as a key factor. States that are actively plugged into professional networks are often identified as being more likely to innovate (Berry and Berry 2007, p. 228). Meanwhile, competitive dynamics are likely to be at work when states adjust their policies to attract inward investment or avoid becoming a ‘welfare magnet’. These ‘race to the top’ and ‘race to the bottom’ dynamics are a prominent theme in many studies of policy convergence as well as Ostrom’s (2010) ideas about polycentrism. Coercive pressures can operate vertically as higher levels of government (namely the federal level in the United States, or the EU in Europe) impose their preferred policy solutions on lower levels. Alternatively, coercion can also operate horizontally as economically powerful states seek to impose their preferred standards on trading partners (Graham et al. 2013).

By the 1990s, greater computational power, allowing more sophisticated event history analysis, enabled analysts to trace diffusion patterns over time and to model internal and external determinants at the same time (Karch 2006, p. 404, Berry and Berry 2007, p. 246). Rather than simply exploring which policies diffuse, at what rate, and involving which actors, in the last 10 years, research has started to test more conditional explanations (Graham et al. 2013). One productive line of analysis is, for example, to explore how the nature and characteristics of policies affects their propensity to diffuse (Makse and Volden 2009, p. 109, Matisoff and Edwards 2014). Drawing on the ‘attributes of innovation’ postulated by Rogers (2003, p. 219; see also Van der Heiden and Strebel 2012, p. 348), it is shedding light on how far their relative advantage, complexity, trialability, and observability affect diffusion patterns, an approach that goes beyond the binary conceptualisations (e.g. radical vs. incremental) employed by innovation researchers in the past. Makse and Volden (2009, pp. 121–122), for example, discovered that the policies which diffuse the fastest are perceived to be easy to follow and relatively advantageous. Similarly, those perceived to be highly salient but low in complexity also seem to diffuse more rapidly (van der Heiden and Strebel 2012), as do those with broad political appeal and low complexity. In the environmental sphere, policies tackling visible problems such as air pollution appear to travel faster and further than those addressing less visible issues such as soil pollution (Busch and Jorgens 2012, p. 236).

Building on this work, there is great potential to break new ground by examining how these attributes of innovation intersect with the three mechanisms of diffusion outlined above. For example, recent work suggests that learning is a more significant mechanism for more observable policies (Makse and Volden 2009, Shipan and Volden 2012). Shipan and Volden (2008, p. 841) discovered that its effects fade faster over time than those triggered by coercion and competition. This line of work is important because it addresses the criticism that diffusion research places far too much emphasis on the characteristics of the adopting actors and process as a whole, as opposed to what is transferred, i.e. the policy’s design. Nonetheless, it is vitally important not to overlook the role of actor capacities – to learn, to compete, or to coerce. States with a weak capacity to learn and codify the lessons (Jacobs 2014, Voss and Simons 2014) may struggle to upload their policy ideas to international fora, which can subsequently be used to coerce other states into adopting the same approach. If we think about sub-national state actors, one of the main findings of the internal determinants literature is that smaller cities are often at a disadvantage, in being less capable of learning, and thus more likely to engage in simple imitation (Shipan and Volden 2008).

The literatures on diffusion and policy transfer are extensive and growing. A great deal of work has focused on the United States, and confirms that states do have the agency to function as ‘policy laboratories’ (Osborne 1990) in the manner suggested by Ostrom (2010) and others (Karch 2006, p. 404). The utilisation of a relatively parsimonious dependent variable has permitted macro-comparative work that is relatively comprehensive and cumulative. The more recent focus on mechanisms and policy characteristics has also addressed persistent criticisms that diffusion scholars have traded too much comprehensiveness in their quest for analytical parsimony.

An invention perspective

The literature concerned with policy invention is considerably smaller, with significantly less agreement on definitions and analytical approaches. As noted above, in its narrowest sense, policy invention is often taken to mean the development of policies that are entirely new. But after decades of environmental policy, it is unlikely that anything fully satisfies this criterion, although some elements of a given policy may do. In other words, most, if not all, ‘new’ policies are more likely to arise through processes of succession (Hogwood and Peters 1982), blending, layering, and/or seemingly random combinations of old and new (Kingdon 1995).

One analytical strategy for dealing with the apparent rarity of policy inventions and the tendency for policies to change as they diffuse is to preserve the term for only a very special type of policy change that is genuinely unique. However, analysts should clearly explain which of a policy’s various constituent elements (goals, instruments, calibrations) is inventive. In principle, invention can occur in any element of Hall’s (1993) well-known definition of policy. In practice, however, change at the instrument-setting level would not seem to qualify, as, by definition, it involves changing something (an instrument) that is already there. New policy paradigms are likely, however, to be sufficiently rare, but probably do not qualify, as they generally do not arise from a specific policy intervention. Consequently, the introduction of new instruments and new policy goals would appear to provide more suitable cases of policy invention using this criterion.

Another, more popular analytical strategy has been to focus on policy invention as a process rather than a thing. Polsby, one of the first to develop this line of thinking, argued that invention is dominated by the ‘politics of inventing, winnowing, and finding and gaining adherents for policy alternatives before they are made part of a “program”’ (Polsby 1984, p. 3). So whereas policy diffusion scholars treat policy as a relatively unproblematic variable, its emergence and internal design elements should be explained because rarely do they appear in their final form. Understanding invention processes therefore requires patient analysis (given the relative fluidity and inscrutability of the early, policy formulation stages of the policy cycle). Failures in existing policies, experienced in the form of disasters or other shock events, may provide impetus for new ones, but typically change will have had to be prepared in advance (Birkland 1997) by individuals who work hard to develop and ‘sell’ alternatives. The role of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ in instigating, implementing, and sometimes blocking policy change has emerged as a popular research topic in recent years (Huitema and Meijerink 2009). They are a special class of politically relevant actor who take an interest in invention, when the powerful – including most politicians – are focused on other things, such as finding excuses not to act (Howlett 2014), or diffusing existing ones (Polsby 1984, p. 172, Sheingate 2003, p. 185). They seek to initiate policy change (Mintrom 1997) and justifiably play a starring role in the theories developed by Kingdon (1995) and many others.

One of the most striking themes to emerge from the literature on policy entrepreneurs is that much policy entrepreneurship is not so much geared towards designing entirely new things as to finding new connections between politics and policy problems; even though they dominate the early stages of the policy cycle, they are not inventors but innovators. Given the legacy of existing policies and programmes, a lot of what they do can be best described as ‘evolutionary tinkering’, or using ‘old stuff … in new ways’ (Sanger and Levin 1992, p. 91, 89), often with no systematic, ex post evaluation of what has worked in the past. Given the vagaries of the issue attention cycle and the need to work within inherited policy structures, tinkering must involve a degree of opportunism. As they look at what is happening around them, entrepreneurs often employ rules of thumb (or ‘decision heuristics’) that bias their search processes and thus condition the subsequent processes of invention and diffusion.

The policy invention literature has generated many important insights into policy innovation. First, it has shed light on the micro-politics of invention, especially on how compromises made at the agenda setting and initiation stages set bounds upon subsequent events (Voss and Simons 2014). These effects are particularly evident in the way that first adopters help shape the policies taken up by later adopters. Of course, new policy design elements can be reintroduced as part of re-invention processes within adopting jurisdictions, but policy entrepreneurs are likely to influence them by shaping and reshaping the perception of the very policy attributes that diffusion scholars believe affect their diffusibility (Makse and Volden 2009, p. 122).

Second, it has confirmed that policy innovation is not a one-off exercise, as suggested by Walker, but is subject to ongoing political contestation. Unlike politicians who will eventually be voted out of power, policy entrepreneurs are more likely to ‘stick around’ (Sheingate 2003, p. 193) with the aim of consolidating inventions and innovations which they may have invested their careers in developing, and seeking linkages to ever-changing political agendas. By networking across borders, they may, for example, play a role in mechanisms of learning, of political argumentation, and in overcoming capacity limitations amongst smaller adopters (Shipan and Volden 2012, p. 790). Policy entrepreneurs do feature in both the policy transfer and diffusion approaches but, with some exceptions, their influence at the initial invention stage (and particularly among first adopters) tends to be downplayed (Mintrom 1997, p. 739).

Third, because they work within the stream of new policy ideas that flows into policymaking (Kingdon 1995), invention scholars are far less likely to assume that policy emerges and/or is adopted in discrete, Walker-like bundles, that innovation is a one-off event, or that innovations are essentially invariant over time. Rather, in order to understand these mutations, analysts should follow innovations and their supportive constituencies of entrepreneurs as they proceed along ‘innovation journeys’ (Hartley 2005, p. 32, Voss and Simons 2014). A temporal approach may not be as amenable to macro-comparative analysis, but it could reveal surprising encounters and unforeseen consequences (Jacobs 2014). Crucially, the dependent variable is not a particular policy but the constituency that nurtured it and, over time, may accept that it has to be adapted as external circumstances change.

An evaluation perspective

The third perspective on policy innovation has sought to explore the effects of policy innovations. Of the three perspectives, it is the least well developed, but recent work by diffusion scholars suggests that it is hugely promising. For example, for an invention to be accepted, often some proof of principle is needed (e.g. through experiments and pilots that are evaluated); stories of successful innovations also usually figure in processes of diffusion (Jacobs 2014). But evaluation may also usefully reveal how long a ‘policy innovation’ lasts. Does it become entrenched in the adopting unit via positive policy feedbacks, or is it quickly amended (Ragusa 2010) and maybe even totally dismantled (Berry et al. 2010, Jordan, Rayner and Schroeder et al. 2013)? A longer time perspective may reveal that a particular policy innovation is really no more than an empty shell (Strebel and Widmer 2012, p. 395) that has little or no influence on front-line officials. Then again, diffusion scholars have reminded us that the very fact that policymakers have looked overseas for the latest policy models and adopted something may serve as a political end in itself (Strebel and Widmer 2012, p. 388). Indeed, policymakers may use non- or ‘negative’ policy changes – the creation of a new ministry for example, or the re-allocation of administrative competences between levels of governance – to signal their political intentions and/or avoid blame (Howlett 2014), changes which would be omitted by conventional diffusion analysis. Studies of the diffusion of ‘non-policy’ elements such as national environmental ministries (Busch and Jorgens 2012, p. 236), policy appraisal, and constitutional provisions suggest that they diffuse in much the same way as policies and are politically consequential.

These trends in the existing literature therefore suggest that, before evaluating ‘effects’, analysts should be clear about which elements and effects of policy will be investigated (, Row 3). Rogers (2003, p. 453) has argued that the consequences of innovation can be grouped into different types: desirable/undesirable, direct/indirect, and anticipated/unanticipated. But over which categories of effect should these be studied? The policy evaluation literature suggests that three main sub-themes should be accounted for, which follow the well-known policy output–outcome–impact chain (see ):

  • 3(a) how the ‘new’ policy adds to or departs from the pre-existing policy mix;

  • 3(b) who eventually wins and loses from policy innovation, and how this enhances or undermines the legitimacy of governance; and

  • 3(c) how far the policy interacts with non-policy aspects such as other forms of governance or contributes to longer-term problem solving.

Sub-theme 3(a) investigates how far the ‘new’ policy differs from and over time may alter the pre-existing policy mix. Instead of focusing on discrete adoption events, analysts could turn the analytical telescope around and start with the pre-existing policy mix in a particular jurisdiction. Then it might be possible to judge whether the new entrant is truly radical (constituting a significant change in goals) or incremental (the addition of an additional instrument; Black et al. 2005, p. 8, Graham et al. 2013, p. 17). On closer inspection, pre-existing policy designs may not yield the clear yardstick assumed by policy diffusion scholars (Blomquist 2007, p. 281), with different elements – policy goals, policy instruments etc. – not only layered on top of one another but possibly changing at different rates. Situations such as this do not lend themselves to clear-cut assessment of the innovativeness (or otherwise) of a newly adopted policy (element), à la Walker. This is why policy scholars are now searching for more finely grained measures of policy change that capture the scope and density of individual instruments (Knill et al. 2012, Graham et al. 2013, p. 17, Jordan et al. 2013). In their contribution to this volume, Schaffrin et al. (2014) contribute directly to this important task (see also Wurzel et al. 2013).

Work in this sub-theme could also address some of the post-adoption dynamics flagged above. By tracing ‘innovations’ after they have been adopted it might be possible to get a better handle on post-adoption dynamics, ranging from conscious amendments (both up and down) through to no change (perhaps contributing to increasing irrelevance) and even wholesale dismantling (Blomquist 2007, p. 271, Jordan et al. 2013). It could reveal whether supposedly radical policy changes are undone relatively quickly, and whether or not the ‘ephemerality rate’ associated with many policy innovations is as ‘distressingly high’ as Lynn (1997, p. 84) and others suspect. It could also shed new light on the relationship between diffusion mechanisms and the attributes of innovation. It is quite likely, for example, that policy innovations that diffuse widely and easily are much more likely to die off and eventually be dismantled than those that diffuse more slowly. Similarly, are policies that diffuse via learning processes in networks more likely to ‘stick’ than those that arise out of coercive pressures? Again, carefully targeted case studies (Bauer and Steurer 2014) could shed new light on these matters.

The second sub-theme – 3(b) – is concerned with who actually benefits from policy innovation and how far governance in general is perceived to be legitimate. The invention and diffusion literatures offer strong clues as to whose interests might be served: politicians chasing votes or hoping to manage policy agendas to their advantage; policy entrepreneurs seeking to get their pet ideas into practice; and of course prestige-chasing policy officials (Black et al. 2005, p. 14). But who actually satisfies their preferences and thus ‘wins’ in practice is likely to concern students of politics directly, as well as those concerned with the overall legitimacy of climate governance. In the transnational climate governance literature, this topic looms especially large (Bulkeley et al. 2012), given the decision not to focus on one of its major sources – the nation state.

In examining the third and final sub-theme – 3(c) – a number of further matters emerge. One hugely important question is what consequences does a given policy innovation generate? For Polsby (1984, p. 8), the acid test of a policy innovation is that it alters (or promises to alter) the lives of people in ‘substantial and fairly permanent ways’. What impacts could be investigated? Most often, debates on the effectiveness of international environmental governance focus on concrete effects, such as reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or the market share of low-carbon products. At least some transnational initiatives have sought to provide self-assessments (Bulkeley et al. 2012). The Cities for Climate Protection programme, for example, has sought to establish a standard greenhouse gas emissions protocol in order to collect data across different contexts. However, such forms of self-monitoring and self-verification remain problematic, in terms of baselines, data availability, reporting, and so on. Both Abbott (2012) and Bulkeley et al. (2012) concede that effectiveness is a vitally important (but difficult) aspect to measure. The policy evaluation literature suggests ways to move forwards and, crucially, offers a battery of tools and methods with which to do so.

Conclusions

To paraphrase Polsby, we hear an awful lot about the need for more innovative climate policies to overcome the paralysing deadlock in the UNFCCC. We have argued that a renewed focus on national policy innovation is very timely, potentially offering a much fuller and richer picture of the changing contours and processes of the ‘new’ climate governance. However, our collective understanding of policy innovation – both in the past and potentially in the future – remains partial. With that purpose in mind, we have identified three important perspectives on policy innovation, pinpointing the definitions and analytical concepts that advocates routinely employ, and what these in turn reveal and hide. Diffusion studies are vitally important in so far as they reveal what is required to ensure that novel policies are taken up. Policy invention studies reveal the underlying sources of novelty in policy systems; sources too often taken for granted by diffusion scholars. And an evaluation perspective highlights important questions, such as whether policy innovation really changes anything or is essentially symbolic, whether adopters have the capacity to absorb innovations (Rogers 2003, p. 471, Fagerberg 2005, p. 11), and how far innovation contributes to the legitimacy and hence longer-term stability of governance.

These three leave open the question of whether innovation is a process, an outcome, or both. By adopting a different analytical reference point, each provides a distinctive way of engaging with the second meta-debate: how big does a change have to be to count as an innovation? Finally, all three – but especially the third – have a different view on the normative status of innovation.

The contributors to this volume take these perspectives and their related concepts and apply them to a number of different examples of policy innovation, spanning for the first time climate mitigation and adaptation. Voss and Simons (2014), Jacobs (2014), and Upham et al. (2014) are principally interested in policy invention. Matisoff and Edwards (2014) and Bauer and Steurer (2014) chiefly focus on processes and patterns of diffusion. Finally, Schaffrin et al. (2014), Hilden (2014), and Hilden et al. (2014) investigate the effects of policy innovation. In our concluding contribution (Jordan et al. 2014a), we relate the findings back to the debates outlined here and formulate a new research agenda to guide work in this rapidly expanding and politically highly salient area of policy and practice.

Acknowledgements

We have benefitted from extensive discussions with participants in workshops on climate policy innovation in Amsterdam and at Madingley Hall (Cambridge) in 2012. We are especially indebted to the participants who kindly provided detailed comments on this paper, as well as Helen Ingram, Chris Rootes, and Tony Zito. We are of course wholly responsible for any remaining errors and omissions. Tim Rayner kindly oversaw the logistical process of bringing the volume to fruition. Andrew acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust (Grant No. F00204AR). Dave and Andrew acknowledge the support of the EU funded RESPONSES project (No. 244092) and the COST funded Action INOGOV (No. IS1309).

Notes

1. See, for example, the emerging debate on ‘orchestration’ in the transnational governance literature (Abbott 2013, Hale and Roger 2014). But see Levi-Faur (2012) on what might be omitted by focusing too heavily on ‘Big Governance’.

2. Although, of course, the literature on policy evaluation is extensive.

References

 

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